Collaborating with git

Overview

Unlike Cueball, your team will learn git well enough to collaborate effectively with it! In this two-session hands-on course, you will work as a team to build a simple static website, laying a foundation for communicating about code in a professional development environment.

You will build confidence and practical skills with git through hands-on work with The Three Objects¹ of git's data model -- moving them around The Three Trees² of git's state model.

You will learn to use Pull Requests (aka PR's) to communicate changes to your team for review and integration into the team's shared work stream.

In the course of a collaborative software development project, you will run various git commands in a Bash shell to examine and change the state of git objects in these trees on your local machine. Some of these commands may be familiar (e.g., git checkout, git add, git commit, git status, git diff) and some may not (git reset, git diff --staged, git rebase, git cherry-pick).

Another major theme is workflows. We will learn and practice some Common Git Workflows, especially those built around Pull Requests, as you build your site. For instance, as your team begins to deliver code, you will encounter challenges (merge conflicts!) inherent to concurrent work on a shared code base, and you will practice using git's and Github's features to resolve them.

Your team will collaborate by working concurrently on changes and delivering to main, aiming toward making your site look more or less like index.html in the sample repo.³

Coding will be kept simple to allow you to focus on git skills; you and your team will modify static HTML and CSS files. The only "webserver" is your local filesystem.

Keep your website viable as you deliver each change to main.   Don't "break the build"!

By the end of our time, we'll have substantially covered the topics in the Course Syllabus.

About the instructor

As a devops professional with three-ish decades of experience in version control, I first experienced git in 2009 when our developers insisted on bringing it into the company. I learned a few basic survival commands, but it wasn't really clicking for me. Depressingly often for a version control "expert", I got out of my depth and had to be rescued.

Eventually I tired of memorizing magic spells and decided to buckle down and learn the basics of git. Suddenly, git started making sense😮! That feeling of enlightenment, along with the big boost in my productivity, helped inspire this course.

I've presented some variation of this material to nearly every CodePlatoon cohort since Bravo. Equipped with a firm grasp of these git fundamentals, graduates have reported they've become go-to resources for git in their software teams.